Couple Play Online Dungeons & Dragons So Much Their Children Almost Starve To Death

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Addiction to the Internet and the online version of the fantasy role-playing game "Dungeons & Dragons" is what led a Reno couple to nearly starve to death their young children, authorities said.

Michael and Iana Straw, 25 and 23, are accused of losing themselves in a virtual world of monster-slaying missions while their children suffered starvation and sickness.One child is 11 months, and the other nearly 2 years old.

Friday morning, the Straws pleaded guilty to two counts of child neglect. Both face a maximum 12-year sentence. Through jail officials, they declined an interview for this article. Their attorneys in the public defender's office could not be reached.

While child abuse because of methamphetamine addiction or alcoholism is common in Washoe County, abuse rooted in computer and video game addiction is rare, said Deputy District Attorney Kelli Ann Viloria, who is prosecuting the Straws.

I always find it terrible to hear of stories like these. It makes me feel as though my craft may have had a hand in causing the end result.

There's an obvious element of addictive personality involved here. DDO in particular was designed so that players didn't have to play for hours on end to advance. They could do a short adventure here, a short adventure there. Many of them took about an hour, give or take thirty minutes. You could progress your character reasonably and still have a life. Clearly, these people went beyond the design intentions.

Other games are not so thoughtful in that respect. Many *do* require large time investments to get anywhere. EverQuest was famous for this back in the day. The wildly popular World of Warcraft's large group material (called "raiding") can take up several hours in one sitting.

This is how the major developers make their money, though. They slow down player progress, which means the player must participate over a longer period of time, which means monthly subscription fees. Some people are so driven to overcome that next hurdle, they pursue it to the detriment of their real world lives.

They're not the only country, but it's estimated that around 100,000 Chinese participate in the business. The "virtual economy" is so huge that it even outranks the economies of many real world nations!

Often, these workers are placed in deplorable conditions (hours, location, or both) and get maybe $100-$250 a month for what they do. It's work that anyone can learn, though, so it's very popular among college students looking for some extra cash.

The workers are paid low wages. Their bosses then sell that currency to brokers at marked up prices. The brokers sell that currency to players in turn, marking it up even further.

Gold farming is detrimental to the health of the games themselves, too. They flood the virtual environments with excess currency, which devalues it. Often, the farmers also engineer the worth of properties within the game, driving up prices. Ironically, this means that people will have to buy large sums of money to purchase expensive in-game items, which are sold for those high prices by (you guessed it) the gold farmers. So, they get real cash for the game currency sale, and then they recover their in-game cash through the marked up items.

China has had a few cases of neglect and even death linked to online games, which is why the limitation policy was created.

It's people themselves. Normal, rational people are not going to get so caught up in a game that they neglect their kids. Blaming the game is like blaming heavy metal music for people who shoot up high schools, or Bugs Bunny cartoons for people who roll homeless guys for money. There may be a correlation between the game (or the music or the cartoon) and the person's underlying problems but they only serve to act as a catalyst for something that's already there not as the cause of the whole thing. At least that's my point of view. Because otherwise, everyone would do this silly shit and most people don't.

Some people can do it in moderation and some cannot. I have been a gamer for a long time, former member of power guilds, etc. I have seen marriages break up, people drop out of college, people lose kids, jobs, houses, etc. All the very same things that happen with many alcoholics. Then you have functioning addicts also, who get away with doing the bare minimum in life so as not to take away game time.

I love gaming, but people need to realize it can be addictive, just like a drug.

It was not unusual for my fellow guildmates to stay up for 48 hours straight, especially on the first few days of a games release or expansion. There is an unexplainable rush to get the first <insert random uber item here> or the first to max out levels, the first to get into whatever dungeon is the new uber one. Always a rush to be first, to be the best.

But we only raid together once a week, if that, and most of those times, our son is either over at the neighbor's house with his little friend or spending the day with my in-laws. Both of us simply can't be engrossed in the game for four hours at a time while our son is with us. I was playing in a small one-hour raid yesterday and almost got kicked out of the raid because, God forbid, I had to go AFK to take my son to the bathroom.

In our previous guild though, there was a couple who had a young son and both of them were online constantly. In fact, they were guild leaders so not only did they attend every raid together but when they weren't raiding, they were farming, organizing guild activities and they also had alts that they played (together) when they weren't doing that. I often wondered how they had time to tend to their son. They were extremely arrogant also because they were so "l33t" but I always wanted to tell them that they may have been great gamers but they were shitty parents. When I first saw this headline, I thought it may have been about them.

World of Warcraft was advertised as a game for the casual player. Throughout most of the advancement process, this remains true. Once you hit the high end, though, I believe the raiding environment becomes more aggressive/emphasized than EverQuest's was at its prime.

They do have two developers who once hailed from EverQuest raiding guilds, though. I'm not surprised by the unfortunate shift in development style.

If they hadn't been playing online games they would have done it for another reason.Notice that THEY weren't starving.And they still managed to have sex, because the one child was 22 months old and the other 11 months old.

Why was a cat peeing on that poor babies head??

These people should be locked the fuck up for a LONG long time. And they should NEVER ever be able to see those children again. I don't want to hear that they were young- this negligent abuse is disgusting.

There were a few guys in my old D&D gaming group that were not exactly social butterflies.

A little joke from when I last gamed regularly a few years back. The group DM and his brother were both there - and both have long-term serious girlfriends. And, myself and another guy were both there and the two of us were both married with kids.

However, four other guys that were supposed to show up were all late - and none had bothered to call. None of those guys had girlfriends, or had any to anybody's knowledge.

So, the guy that was the group DM made the sarcastic comment, "Isn't it amazing that the guys with lives - you know, the ones who have "gotten laid" - are the ones that are here on time and ready to go?"

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